Opeth: Mikael Åkerfeldt's Long Goodbye to Growling

In 2011 one of the best death metal bands in the world put out an album with no death metal on it, and split its own audience clean down the middle. That album was Heritage, the band was Opeth, and the man who did it on purpose was Mikael Åkerfeldt, following his own taste off a cliff he had been walking towards for years.

Opeth formed in Stockholm in 1989, and Åkerfeldt took the wheel early, becoming the songwriter, guitarist, lead vocalist and guiding intelligence of the whole project. For roughly two decades they were the most sophisticated death metal band going — a group that treated brutality and beauty as equal partners, and swung between them inside a single ten-minute song. That combination is the thing to understand about Opeth, because it explains both the greatness and the eventual divorce with half their fans.

Two voices in one band

Classic-era Opeth worked because Åkerfeldt has two voices and used both. There is the death growl, a deep, cavernous roar he deployed on the heavy passages, and there is a warm, melancholy clean tenor he used for the quiet ones. A typical Opeth track would move from a passage of crushing, downtuned death metal into a fingerpicked acoustic interlude that sounds like a lost seventies folk record, and back again, held together by songwriting patient enough to make the transitions feel inevitable.

The scale of the songs was part of the ambition. Opeth built in long form — tracks routinely ran past ten minutes, structured more like suites than songs, with movements that developed and returned rather than verses that repeated. That patience is what separated them from the pack. Plenty of bands could write a brutal riff or a pretty acoustic passage; Opeth could sequence a dozen of them into a coherent journey that justified its length. The heaviness never felt gratuitous and the calm never felt like filler, because each section earned its place in the architecture. It is compositional thinking of a kind that rock rarely attempts, and it is the reason the early records reward repeat listening decades on.

The masterpiece of this period is usually agreed to be 2001’s Blackwater Park, made with the English producer and Porcupine Tree leader Steven Wilson, whose fingerprints deepened the atmosphere and the studio craft. From there the band’s imperial run continued through Ghost Reveries in 2005 and Watershed in 2008 — dense, dynamic, progressive death metal that treated the long song as a serious form. If you wanted proof that extreme metal could be genuinely compositional, Opeth were exhibit A. They were also, quietly, getting less and less interested in the extreme part.

The Wilson partnership is a clue to where it all went. Working with the Porcupine Tree man pulled Opeth deeper into a world of studio texture, vintage keyboards and progressive-rock structure that had little to do with death metal’s usual concerns. Åkerfeldt is, famously, a compulsive collector of obscure seventies records — the deep cuts of British and European prog, folk and psychedelia — and every album let a little more of that collection bleed into the writing. The acoustic passages on Blackwater Park and Damnation were the first symptoms. By Watershed the prog sections were as ambitious as the metal ones, and it was becoming clear which way the balance was tipping. A patient listener could see Heritage coming from a decade out, even if the abruptness of the switch still landed as a shock.

The 2011 turn

The break came with Heritage, released in September 2011. It was the band’s first album since 2003’s Damnation to contain none of Åkerfeldt’s death growls at all, and unlike Damnation — a deliberate soft companion piece — this was presented as the new direction full stop. Heritage is a seventies progressive rock album: Mellotrons, Hammond organ, Rhodes piano, knotty time signatures, jazz-inflected passages and Åkerfeldt’s clean voice throughout. The metal was gone, replaced by the record collection he had clearly loved all along.

The reaction was a civil war. A large part of Opeth’s audience felt abandoned, and said so loudly, because the growl and the heaviness were exactly what they had come for. Another part cheered a band brave enough to follow its convictions into unfashionable territory. Åkerfeldt was unrepentant, and stayed that way. Pale Communion in 2014, Sorceress in 2016 and In Cauda Venenum in 2019 continued down the progressive path, and as of this writing he has not put a death growl on a studio record since Watershed back in 2008. Whatever else you say about the man, he meant it.

I have a lot of respect for the move, and I say that as someone who genuinely misses the growl. It would have been trivially easy for Opeth to keep making the album that half a million people wanted, tour it forever and cash the cheques. Instead Åkerfeldt made the record that forty-year-old Åkerfeldt actually wanted to hear, knowing it would cost him. That is a rare kind of artistic honesty, and it is the same stubbornness that made the early records great in the first place. The instinct that told him a death metal song could contain a folk interlude is the same instinct that eventually told him to drop the death metal. You cannot have one without the other.

The band that never belonged to a scene

Part of what makes Opeth’s story clean is that they were always slightly apart from everything around them. They came up in the same country and the same decade as the great melodic exporters, yet Opeth had little to do with the Gothenburg sound and its harmonised, radio-facing melodic death. They were Stockholm, they were darker and more sprawling, and their reference points ran back to seventies British prog and folk rather than to the west-coast metal template. That outsider position gave Åkerfeldt room to move. A band anchored to a scene has to answer to the scene; a band that never fully joined one can wander off whenever its leader’s taste changes.

There is a real kinship there with Meshuggah, the other great Swedish band who followed a private, uncompromising idea for decades regardless of whether the audience was ready — Meshuggah into rhythmic abstraction, Opeth into vintage prog. Both are evidence that the deepest strength of Swedish metal is a tolerance for artists who take the long, difficult road on purpose. Åkerfeldt’s later material — atmospheric, dynamic, built for close listening — belongs on the kind of stage that rewards patience and mood over sheer volume, the world of a festival like Roadburn where the crowd comes to be immersed rather than pummelled.

The long goodbye

What I find most moving about Opeth is that the goodbye to growling was never a single dramatic moment. It was a slow leaving that had been underway for a decade before Heritage made it official. The acoustic passages got longer. The prog influences got bolder. The quiet Åkerfeldt was always fighting the loud one for space, and around 2011 the quiet one simply won.

The live show changed with the records, and watching it evolve told its own story. Older Opeth sets were exercises in dynamic whiplash, lurching from crushing heaviness to fragile acoustic calm and back, Åkerfeldt switching between his two voices in the space of a bar. The later shows are warmer, more relaxed, closer to a seventies prog band playing a seated theatre than a metal band working a pit. Åkerfeldt himself turned out to be a genuinely funny, self-deprecating frontman between songs, chatting to the crowd with a dry wit that has become as much a part of the Opeth experience as the music. It softened the transition. Even fans who mourned the growl found it hard to stay angry at a man that charming and that obviously in love with what he was doing.

Whether you think that was a triumph or a betrayal probably depends on which Opeth you fell for. Both are defensible; both camps are arguing about a genuinely great band. What is not in dispute is that Mikael Åkerfeldt did the harder, braver thing — he changed while he was winning, and dared his audience to follow. Some did, some did not, and the band kept going either way, which is exactly what you would expect from the most single-minded songwriter Swedish metal ever produced.

If there is a moral to the story, it is a quiet argument for trusting artists over audiences. Every commercial incentive pointed Åkerfeldt back toward the growl and the guaranteed cheer. He ignored all of it and made the records his own ear demanded, and the catalogue is richer for the whole arc — the death metal masterpieces and the prog records alike, one long body of work by a man who kept asking what he actually wanted to hear next. That the two halves barely sound like the same band is the point. Very few artists get to have two careers. Åkerfeldt built his second one on purpose, in daylight, while everyone was watching and most of them were shouting at him to stop.